I've been MIA from this forum for awhile. Bought a different house, gutted it, finished and moved in. During the renovation, I installed a 96% efficient forced air furnace and all accompanying ductwork. The house was formerly heated with electric ceiling loops. I also transplanted my Blazeking Princess into the house. There is currently no whole house humidification. I use a console unit on the floor and pots on top of the stove but am looking to automate some of it. Quite frankly, I grow tired of hauling water. Obviously the furnace does not run when I am burning wood. So a bypass humidifier on the furnace would likely not help much. I'm considering a steam humidifier and hoping someone here is or has used one. Your opinions and experience will be appreciated.
Controlling Humidity- Steam Humidifier?
- Thread starter bjorn773
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Dieselhead
Minister of Fire
jetsam
Minister of Fire
I run one all winter. I replaced a wick-style humidifier with a steam one that holds 2 1 gallon water tanks. I fill one tank a day in the winter, usually.
The only mess is cleaning the heating element (it gets a lot of mineral buildup on it), and that happens in the kitchen sink. You could get around that by using distilled water, but I'd rather just clean it every year or two.
No wick to change, no mold to worry about, much better.
The only mess is cleaning the heating element (it gets a lot of mineral buildup on it), and that happens in the kitchen sink. You could get around that by using distilled water, but I'd rather just clean it every year or two.
No wick to change, no mold to worry about, much better.
I would love to hear how you did all of this. I have no ducting in a 1963 built rambler heated with just electric wall heaters and my stove!
On the humidity, nothing you put on your stove will make enough steam to do the job. Start my limiting the amount of fresh air being introduced to your home. Use an outside air feed for your stove, make sure there are no open windows, air gaps around doors etc. You can reheat the outside air but the very low humidity of that outside air is a problem.
I would investigate adding a plumbed humidifier to the HVAC system that runs even when no heat is being called for. Just like people run their furnace fans to distribute stove heat.
Adding all of the ductwork was challenging to say the least. I dropped the furnace in a location in the basement that seemed to make the most sense, then started running ducts. I had to tear out all of the ceilings in the finished basement to gain access. It was a several month job. The ducts need to be gradually dropped in size every so many feet to maintain proper air volume and velocity. I consulted a lot of charts online. Overall, I am pretty happy with the performance. But, I never installed a humidifier.
I will try to put an OAK on my stove. The stove backs up to my attached garage, so I could pull air from there with about 2 feet of pipe with relative ease.
What brand/model are you running? I go through a wick about every month. I'd like find a steam floor model. The in furnace steam humidifiers draw 12 amps, that would negate any savings I have from burning wood for heat.
heat seeker
Minister of Fire
jetsam
Minister of Fire
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B001FWXJHS/?tag=hearthamazon-20
It looks just like that one, anyway. My only complaint was that the LED is way too bright- I was going to replace it, but I stuck a piece of electrical tape over it temporarily, and that worked so well I stopped caring.
Put the water in the tanks, it boils it off until the humidistat tells it to stop. It's an old analog humidistat.
There's also a UV light bulb which I disconnected on the theory that anything that survived the boiling had earned the right to be there.
I think it was supposed to be a selling point for the germophobic crowd, but I wasn't interested in running a 14 watt tube 24/7 to keep imaginary bacteria from breeding in boiling water. 
A basement would make retrofit HVAC much easier. I would have to go into an unfinished attic since a loarge part of my single story home is on a slab. Heating vents in the ceiling. Ick.
Enclosed crawlspaces, attics, and garages are all off limits for intake air but I see no problem running through the garage to an outside wall where you could install the inlet.
There's also a UV light bulb which I disconnected on the theory that anything that survived the boiling had earned the right to be there.
And the UV Light only lasts so long before it is no longer capable of disinfection. So power cost and bulb replacement. They do a similar thing in hottubs, a UV light to create ozone but nobody replaces the bulb so it is just a marketing scam.
jetsam
Minister of Fire
Just be creative.
"That? Oh, that's the transmission hump. This whole room used to be a dump truck. Do you lile the way we carpeted it?"
Why would the attic be off limits? It is vented with soffit and ridge vents. I was just thinking I could pop out the wall into the garage and run the pipe up through the finished garage ceiling into the attic for fresh air. No go?
I think the keyword is "enclosed". Once you ventilate the space to the outdoors things might be different. For example, I draw OAK air from my ventilated crawlspace. It's not enclosed but also it is lower than the hearth which brings us to the second issue.
Most stoves, including BK, prohibit you from going up above the firebox with your intake. I remember when BKVP pointed this out because it makes a basement install really hard. The idea is that you don't ever want the OAK pipe competing with your chimney to provide the draft. If the smoke chose to go backwards and through the intake it could pump your attic full of smoke and heat!
If you want to look into running the OAK above the firebox and especially if into a ventilated attic then I am not able to advise a legal way to do it. Someone else?
That makes sense. I am trying to avoid having to cut thru the brick exterior of my house to do this. Perhaps there is no way around it.
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edyit
Minister of Fire
With 13 years of experience as Water Superintendent I can tell you that UV light is not used to create ozone. UV light is used as a form of disinfectant on water that has a low NTU. Ozone is created with a lot of electricity to get O2 to form into O3, which is an extremely effective oxidizer and removes dissolved minerals from solution and as a disinfectant.
I'm not an operator but have more than 13 years as a licensed civil engineer designing water treatment equipment among other things. I can tell you that ozone is created in a hot tub application by a UV light and then that ozone is sucked into the tub to help with the disinfection load. The UV light does not directly radiate the bugs as you might see in a sewage treatment process. You are thinking of the corona discharge method but both are used to create ozone for disinfection and for a hot tub almost exclusively with UV light because it's much cheaper.
(broken link removed to https://www.ozonesolutions.com/journal/tag/how-uv-light-makes-ozone/)
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Here's a much better article written by my supplier of spa parts again showing that UV most certainly is used to create ozone.
(broken link removed to https://www.spadepot.com/spacyclopedia/ozone-information.htm)
(broken link removed to https://www.spadepot.com/spacyclopedia/ozone-information.htm)
edyit
Minister of Fire
yes you're correct UV light in the range from 160 – 240 nm will create ozone from oxygen. in all the applications I have seen they just use the UV as a straight disinfectant on low NTU water not as a production on O3. and as with anything you can get DBP such as undesirable aldehydes and ketones by reacting with certain organics, and it also carries no residual. but everything that reacts with organics has some form of DBP just like Cl2 or NaOCl
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